Wednesday, July 22, 2009

bibliophile...


The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. (i put a * by the ones i own...that i could remember off the top of my head)...Tag other book lovers.

1 Pride and Prejudice -X *
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -x*
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -x*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -x*
6 The Bible - X*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -x*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -x*
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -x*

8/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -X*
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -*(seriously i own a copy from 1912)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -x*
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

10/20

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -x*
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -*
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -*
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -x*
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -x

13/30

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -*
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -*
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -x*
34 Emma - Jane Austen -x*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - x*
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X*

17/40

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -x*
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -*
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -x* (one of my FAVORITE books)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -x*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -X*
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -X*
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

22/50

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -X*
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -X*
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -X*
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez –

25/60

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -X*
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -X*
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-*
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -*
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -X*
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -*

29/70

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -*
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -X*
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -X*
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -*
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -*
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

31/80

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -X*
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -X*
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -*
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X*
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -X*
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

34/90

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -*
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -X*
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -*
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -X*
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -X*
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -*

Read:38/100
Own:58/100
meh...not bad, i guess...i could read more...(obviously they are sitting in there waiting for me...and MANY i have owned before and not read.....) this was fun. my kind of "quiz"...

Monday, July 20, 2009

i just made a personal mission statement....holy ________





I am at my best when i feel strong and clear within my own spirit, knowing that i am beautiful and wonderful and a female warrior and a light-carrying spiritual being..
I will try to prevent times when i allow thoughts of other people's judgement and dislike of me invade my mind....when i wallow in procrastination and without direction.
I will enjoy my work by finding how to create a beautiful, calm home for my children so that they will have had a treasured, lovely, loving, calm childhood. i like to create an ecclectic environment that caters to my hedonistic, sensual tendencies... i love to be old fashioned and untainted by the media.
I will find enjoyment in my personal life through my love of reading, writing, reaching out to people on the computer, pondering spiritual principles within my own life,my relationship with jonathan , and within the mothering of my children.
i love to relax and make other people comfortable.
I will find opportunities to use my natural talents and gifts such as being a very strong encourager of other people and a muse who likes to share my differentness with the world.
i am a very strong feminine influence and know a lot about birth, and women's mysteries.
i tend to think that i write well, when i make the time for it, and i love to make collage art in all sorts of ways, either with paper, words, or through media on the computer.
i know a lot. i have a huge mind for trivia.
I can do anything I set my mind to. I will create a lovely home, provide for my children's needs without being materialistic, merely comfortable/comforting.
i will be a romantic wife.
i will get as environmentally sustainable as possible.
i will allow myself the time and comfort and self-esteem to write a book.
i will encourage other women in feminine strength and homebirth.
i will travel to all the places that interest me..
My life's journey is that i feel that i must write a book that is a huge encouragement for women both towards homebirth, and about raising their children with unorthodox methods, and feeling alright about that. about being equal, if not superior to men, and encouraging them to be as strong and outspoken as they can be.
When i am an old woman, i would like to be surrounded by my children, who are healthy, well adjusted, mentally stable and financially secure.
i would like to see my grandchildren, whom i have been able to influence as unique, beautiful individuals.
i would love to be surrounded by the women i have helped to empower and babies (who are now old people) that i have helped to come into the world peacefully throught the empowerment of their mothers (and their fathers).
My most important future contribution to others will be i hope to have inspired my children to be empowered individualists, unscarred by the media and herd mentality of this culture. i hope to have raised them well and kindly and beautifully and passionately and that i am able to guide them to being more prepared for adulthood than i was.
i want to be a good, beautiful woman to jonathan and a beautiful female partner to him..

I will stop procrastinating and start working on:

i need to find a way to build a wall between who i am now and my past, the people who have hurt me, who could possibly hurt me now, who would judge me, or my distorted habitual thinking about those things.

i need to lose weight and become more healthy to be able to live a longer, higher quality of life than i have done in the past. i need to decode why i am addicted to food and how to break that addiction so that i only put into my body healthy food. i also want to move my body more and be more flexible, lithe, and pretty.

i need to write the book.

i need to wake up everymorning with the selfassurance that i am worthy to be listened to and that i have very important things to say to women and be able to encourage other (poor) women every single day of my life.
i feel that i may be a very important carrier of strength to an empowered birth movement.

I will strive to incorporate the following attributes into my life:

ecclectic beauty and spiritual power
accomplishment of my life's purpose
personal magnetism

I will constantly renew myself by focusing on the four dimensions of my life:

practice yoga, eat only natural foods, ingest only pure substances, run, swim, breathe, be lithe, lose weight, beauty rituals
confidence in my personal truth, selfassurance in my creative belief system. talk more to people and share myself and my thoughts. listen to other's deepest thoughts without judgement.
close off from the negative past. learn to forgive. be more positively oriented. love myself.
be more kind. be more caring. be more passionate. be more giving. express myself better to other people. be comfortable with myself so i can eventually be more comfortable with other people.


(i did this with a mission statement builder online at: http://www.franklincovey.com/msb/ )